Wagners verdict shows the likes of Alan Jones can be called out

By Madonna King

Amen. Yesterday’s defamation verdict against Alan Jones doesn’t only polish the reputation of a Queensland family who should never have been tarnished.

It also goes to show how big-city musers struggle to understand the life of others, particularly those in rural and regional Australia, like Toowoomba.

Alan Jones was found to have defamed the Wagners.

Photo: AAP

But the lessons handed down in the defamation payout awarded against Jones don’t stop there, either.

It gives all of us, as the Wagners said yesterday, renewed confidence in the judicial system. It shows that sometimes you can take on the loud person in the centre of the room and silence them. It shows that the type of hectoring delivered each weekday morning by Jones should not go unchallenged.

Imagine being told you were responsible for killing 12 people. Imagine that accusation reverberating daily around the town where you work and your children go to school, and where you have links going back to the mid-1850s.

Imagine not knowing how you fight back against someone who uses a microphone as a weapon, and who has the ear of those in Canberra who are too scared to take him on.

Imagine that.

Thank goodness the Wagners didn’t cop the accusations they found abhorrent, vicious, deceitful and spiteful. And thank goodness they were wealthy enough to take action and fund a court case to prove Alan Jones’ claims were baseless.

The Wagners have used their plentiful dollars also to invest in their local community and the future of workers there, and that’s why this episode has been so painful. Of course some will always disagree but go and ask those who call the Darling Downs home about the contribution of this family.

They will tell you stories about how the airport has put a kick into the local economy and how it is employing locals, who might otherwise be jobless. They will tell you about a family who works in the area, and gives back to the area.

They’ll tell you about the enormous toll this has taken on the family, without any justification.

As Lucy Stone writes here, the court found the 76 defamatory imputations brought before it were "extremely serious" and of the "gravest kind".

These included claims that the Wagner family were part of a cover-up to avoid responsibility over the deaths, and that it was corrupt in its work to build the Toowoomba airport.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

That was the verdict, and it is more than a personal vindication in a week where other big players were also taken down a peg.

At the royal commission into financial misconduct, we heard the polite voice of Baptist minister Grant Stewart explaining how ASX-listed Freedom Insurance sold life insurance to his 26-year-old disabled son. It was heartbreaking.

Mr Stewart and the Wagner family might not have too much in common, but this week they both did us a favour.

In the best and most respectful way they could, they spoke up and called out behaviour, a right and responsibility we all have.